Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
“If you can’t understand the spec for a new technology, don’t worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won’t be that… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
“In any case, even if a usability test resolves a dispute, it doesn't do it in any kind of a statistically valid way. Unless… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
“The confidence you get from knowing about every crash, anywhere in the world, is crucial to delivering a high-quality product that needs to be… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
“Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
